169 Responses

Without anyone looking over their shoulders, they spent at least a year falling down, throwing up, and smashing letterboxes. Any course-work handed in would be done in a blaze of panic; a couple of hastily-typed pages thrown together and sprinted across campus to be flung in a submissions box seconds before the deadline.

I can attest to the truth of this statement, and you are right, my parents should have kept me home. If they had done that, instead of sending me to boarding school and university, perhaps I would have amounted to something by now.

Anyone know a good lawyer? Surely I can make them pay for their mistake?

Without anyone looking over their shoulders, they spent at least a year falling down, throwing up, and smashing letterboxes. Any course-work handed in would be done in a blaze of panic; a couple of hastily-typed pages thrown together and sprinted across campus to be flung in a submissions box seconds before the deadline.

At my university, they even have a name: engineering students. (Don't ever let anyone induce you to help mark first-year engineering essays. Your belief in humanity will never recover.)

HIST 110 for me - dropped my science papers after the first HIST 110 lecture (also at the university featuring the engineering students, as it happens). Megan Wegan is right - surely there must be some legal comeback against our parents for permitting this descent into a lifetime of unpaid thinking?

I remember reading an article a while ago about the so-called "helicopter Moms" at American universities - the mothers who are constantly hovering around their children, even while the kids are living on campus. While I never encountered their like while at uni myself, I'm sure they exist here.

I sort of fit the "Philosphy as gateway drug" scenario myself, but it was entirely self-inflicted: I was always best at Classics and English at high school, but figured an Arts degree was too impractical. One and a half years of a BE later (having taken Philosophy and Anthro papers as my electvies), I found myself hating what I was doing, so thought "fuck it" and changed to a BA in Philosphy. My parents were fine with it, and it got me a job in Tech Writing (eventually), so I can't complain.

The only student worse than an Engineering student is a Performance Voice student.

On behalf of my best friend, hey! And also, possibly, fair point.

For me it was HIST 133 (Medieval Europe)

I did that! Retained facts: Charlemagne was really, really tall.

The most seriously I nearly went astray (and bear in mind I was doing English lit on purpose) was loving CLAS 215 Hellenistic Egypt so much I nearly changed to one of the few majors of less use than mine.

I remember reading an article a while ago about the so-called "helicopter Moms" at American universities - the mothers who are constantly hovering around their children, even while the kids are living on campus. While I never encountered their like while at uni myself, I'm sure they exist here.

The only student worse than an Engineering student is a Performance Voice student.

Laugh it up while you can, arts grads.

You'll be laughing on the other sides of your faces as soon as you need a bridge built, or a new sewage farm, or an electic-petrol hybrid with an improved cupholder to hold your soy moccachino while you drive to your organic farmers market.

Then we'll see whose laughing.

And if that doesn't work, you wait until my army of giant robots is ready....